And just because its romance month….yet another scandal is brewing in Romancelandia (maybe you missed Cockygate?) Author Courtney Milan (former law clerk for SCOTUS and one of my insta-buy Romance authors along with Sherry Thomas, Joanna Bourne and Lisa Kleypas) has called out Brazilian author Cristiane Serruya for outright plagiarims of one of her books. Only if you read the twitter thread #CopyPasteCris….the plot thickens. Serruya claims a ghostwriter on Fiverr is the real culprit. However, not only have multiple books with Serruya’s name on it been discovered with passages plagiarized from many big-name Romance authors including Tessa Dare and Nora Roberts (here’s Nora’s post where she talks about how heartbroken she was when Janet Dailey plagiarized her as well as her thoughts about Serruya)…but one of the books in question got Serruya a USA Today best selling author title, was entered in the RITA awards, and now several ghost writers have come forward saying they turned down work form Serruya that was “take these scenes and cobble them together in to a novel”.

Moral of the story…don’t plagiarize from super famous authors who are also lawyers.

I almost feel sorry for Serruya…but NOT. Multiple plagiarizing, false gaming of the system, and now she’s all like “poor me, and no way could I have done this because I’m a lawyer too” (which makes it worse in my book.)

The blaming of ghost writers is also a bit out of hand, methinks. Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch has some important thoughts on how much time and effort it takes authors to actually use ghostwriters when creating books or shared worlds and why she is a control freak over her product.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has screen shots of tweets and the plagiarism and the exhausting list of famous authors affected. “And then there’s the ridiculousness of lifting so much from so many places to assemble into one book. Imagine the work that goes into creating a new document, then taking portions of others, fitting them into the skeleton of some kind of narrative, and finding others to add in as well. Forget the mathematical calculations of how many tabs that would be in a browser. Why would someone do that? It seems like an astonishing amount of really, really dumb work and, as always, you’ll get caught. “